The present invention relates generally to building computer systems and more particularly to the preparation of build-to-order computer systems.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/951,135, filed on Oct. 15, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,944,820, entitled "Modifiable Partition Boot Record for a Computer Memory Device", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/984,386, filed on Dec. 3, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,041,395, entitled "System and Method for Changing Partition Mappings to Logical Drives in a Computer Memory", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/950,545, filed on Oct. 15, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,032,239, entitled "System and Method for Updating Partition Mappings to Logical Drives in a Computer Memory Device", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/947,138, filed on Oct. 8, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,029,237, entitled "Method for Simulating a Computer Storage Device", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 08/951,137, filed on Oct. 15, 1997, now U.S. Pat. No. 6,032,223, entitled "System and Method for Utilizing a RAM Disk", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/012,196, filed on Jan. 23, 1998, entitled "System and Method for Preparing a Computer Memory", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/198,007, filed on Nov. 24, 1998, entitled "Computer System and Method for Accessing a Computer-Readable Medium", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/198,731, filed on Nov. 24, 1998, entitled "Computer System and Method for Preparing a Computer-Readable Medium", naming Alan Beelitz as inventor. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
This application relates to co-pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/235,862, filed on Jan. 25, 1999, entitled "Recoverable Software Installation Process and Apparatus For Computer System", naming Alan Beelitz and Richard Amberg as inventors. The co-pending application is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety, and is assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
A present trend among some computer manufacturers is to provide a customer with a custom built computer system in which the customer has designated that certain components and capabilities are to be included in the system being ordered. It is therefore important to maximize efficiency at every step of the build-to-order process. That efficiency begins at the time the order is placed and processed, and continues throughout the assembly, testing and shipment of the custom-built unit.
During production of build-to-order computer systems, specific components for a computer are pulled from stock and taken to an assembly pod where those specific components are assembled in the computer chassis. Following assembly, the chassis is moved to a quick-test area where tests are conducted to quickly determine whether the correct components for that order are installed, and whether the components are operative.
Following the quick test procedure, assembled chassis are moved to a burn rack where the components are "burned in" and where operational errors may be detected. Many units are simultaneously tested on the burn racks and the tests may take a number of hours to complete. With many units in production waiting to be tested, it is important that the burn rack spaces available for testing are used efficiently. Therefore, it is important that the computers or devices under test (DUT) are tested in a manner which quickly and efficiently determines whether a DUT is satisfactorily operational and if not, which quickly and efficiently determines operational deficiencies so that the DUT may be removed from the burn rack to free up the occupied burn rack space for another DUT to be tested.
Due to the amount of time required when rebooting a system, especially with respect to servers, it is highly desirable to avoid reboots in the manufacturing process whenever possible. One area in which it has been possible to eliminate a reboot (in most cases) has been following a hard disk drive preparation. Because the disk preparation process involves partitioning and formatting of the hard disk drive(s), it was traditionally necessary to reboot the system being manufactured so that the operating system (e.g., DOS) could recognize the new disk layout and construct logical drives accordingly. With the introduction of a utility called Waffle, however, it became possible to either refresh the characteristics of an existing logical C: drive (the "refresh" function) or to create an entirely new logical C: drive (the "synthesis" function).
Although this approach has been extremely successful in eliminating reboots in most cases, it has a couple of limitations. One limitation is that only the logical C: drive is refreshed or synthesized; whereas, if the manufacturing process needs to access a logical D: drive, for example, (as may be necessary for LCM server installation), a reboot is still required. Another situation in which the current implementation requires a reboot is the case where the hard disk drive(s) originally contained no recognizable partitions and a block device driver (such as for a RAM drive) has been loaded. Note that drive letters are allocated by the DOS operating system in a first come first served manner. In this case where the hard disk drive(s) originally contain not recognizable partitions, the block device will have been assigned logical drive letter C: and Waffle cannot update the logical drive to reflect the hard disk layout without losing accessibility to the block device. A computer system reboot would be required.
The prior method used to solve the above mentioned problem involves the rebooting of the computer systems being manufactured, when logical drives other than the C: drive must be accessed or when a block device has already been mapped to the C: drive. This, however, is disadvantageously time consuming in a high volume computer manufacturing environment. Manufacturing efficiency and throughput are adversely affected.